Enoc Perez’s Condado Beach, Puerto Rico (2023) extends the artist’s long investigation into architecture as a carrier of ideology. Born in Puerto Rico and trained in New York at Pratt Institute, Perez first became known in the 1990s for paintings of modernist towers that highlighted the political ambitions built into large-scale structures. He developed a distinctive process that merges painting and printmaking by transferring oil paint onto canvas through drawings on tracing paper. This method creates surfaces that feel pressed, layered, and slightly distanced from the hand. His works from this period entered major public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both New York, and the British Museum, London.

Condado Beach shows the artist turning his attention from global modernism to the geography of his birthplace. In this body of work, Perez uses the same transfer technique to examine the visual codes of tropical paradise. Beaches, clear water, and bright light signal pleasure and abundance, repeating the language of travel advertising and resort marketing. The imagery carries an immediate appeal, yet it also exposes the economic and political frameworks that shape how Puerto Rico is seen and sold. By presenting these idealised vistas through a process rooted in mechanical reproduction, Perez underscores the extent to which paradise is constructed, circulated, and consumed.

The painting therefore works on two levels. At first glance it aligns with the familiar promise of escape, but its material structure invites a closer reading of who benefits from this narrative and who remains outside it. Through this tension between surface beauty and critical inquiry, Perez connects architecture, place, and colonial histories, reaffirming his interest in how images define both desire and power.